The Atlantic was founded in 1857.  Their December 2019 Issue:  The Atlantic Devotes Its December Issue to a Special Report: “How to Stop a Civil War”  Essays consider how America is coming apart—and prospects for rebuilding a more civil, functional, and unified society.

June 2020 Issue Atlantic – Special Preview.  We Are Living in a Failed State.  The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.  By George Packer

• When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

Apr 28, 2020. Commentary on the article at at RealClearPolitics.com.  The Perilous State of Our Union, and How We Got Here by Les Francis

May 2019 National survey of citizens sponsored by the American Bar Association

• The nationally representative poll of 1,000 members of the American public found troubling gaps in their knowledge of American history and government, as well as constitutional rights. One in 10 think the Declaration of Independence freed slaves in the Confederate states and almost 1 in 5 believe the first 10 amendments of the U.S. Constitution are called the Declaration of Independence instead of the Bill of Rights.

• In [the] 2018 version of the Woodrow Wilson foundation test, only 13% of Americans could accurately tell you when the Constitution was ratified, 60% didn’t know who the U.S. fought in World War II, and only 24% correctly identified a single thing Ben Franklin was famous for. (Some 37% believed he invented the lightbulb.) In the 2019 version of the survey, only 43% knew that President Wilson was the U.S. commander-in-chief during World War I, which was particularly galling to the poll sponsors.